Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [11]
In the center of the Bull Gang sat Dragline, leaning on one arm, one leg stretched out straight, his other knee bent upright. Casually he smoked his cigarette, his eyes squinted, his gaze fixed on nothing at all. His face was relaxed into that affable, sleepy expression of a hound with the same sad lines angling down along the sides of his nose to become lost in the flabbiness of his fat, wide cheeks. Dragline’s hair is thin and “whiteheaded.” His eyes are pale blue, his big, bulging nose a continuation of his sloping forehead. His fat lips sag loosely forward, shapeless and obscene.
Between his ankles a heavy chain snaked through the dust, polished and shiny from being deliberately dragged day after day through sand and clay and over concrete roads. Dragline doesn’t wear the usual paraphernalia of a Chain Man, the straps and strings that keep the ankle rings high up on their calves. Instead, he drags his chain, assisting the wearing process by walking along the roads as much as he can, tinkling out an iron melody wherever he goes. By now the center links are extremely thin, worn down to almost nothing after eleven months of hard use. Because when the Captain first put the shackles on Dragline he was told he would have to wear them until they fell off.
Dragline is one of the big ones, weighing about two hundred and twenty with massive shoulders, arms and chest and a very heavy, protruding belly. Although not yet thirty he is absolutely toothless. The night of his arrest the detectives in Miami handcuffed his wrists and hung him over the top of a door. Then they worked on him with a piece of garden hose. But as soon as they took him down and his hands were free, Dragline took a swing at one of them, catching him right alongside the bridge of his nose and breaking the bone. Within seconds Drag was overwhelmed and knocked to the floor with blackjacks. Then they really gave it to him, working him over with their feet until finally one of the Dicks rammed the heel of his shoe into Drag’s mouth, kicking and grinding until it was a toothless, bleeding, cursing and screaming hole.
Like all the outstanding characters of the Camp, he had to earn his nickname. When the Walking Boss brought in the squad after his first day out on the road, the Captain asked how he had made out with the new man. Boss Godfrey’s answer was loud enough for the rest of us to hear.
Ain’t never seen nothin‘ like it, Cap’n. He can shovel more mud than any six men put together. He’s like a human dragline.
But once upon a time, his name was Clarence Slidell.
He was a country boy from Clewiston who went barefooted and wore faded dungarees to school. The girls laughed at his big nose and his fat belly and to get even he pulled their hair and knocked the books out of their arms. After school his father made him hoe corn and pick snap beans until dark. On Saturday nights his father got drunk and beat him with his belt for neglecting his chores.
Clarence; the country bumpkin, the buffoon, the brawler. He spent his early years in and out of fights, jails, barrooms, automobile accidents, love affairs and courtrooms, paying fines to the city and county authorities as regularly as you make payments on your mortgage.
Eventually he learned a few angles while doing time at the county farm, getting his education in the same way as the rest of us, absorbing the techniques, the warnings and the inspiration from the conversations of our peers. So in spite of his bulk and his clumsiness Clarence became a burglar, eventually specializing in motels. His Kilroy nose used to peer over the window sill as he watched the tourists go to bed. When they were asleep he would press his fingers against the window screen to keep it from screeching as he slowly forced an ice pick through the mesh and flicked open the latch. After easing the screen open he brought out his personal invention, a collapsible aluminum pole made of telescoping sections with a rubber tipped grabble at the end operated by a fine wire. It was like those grappling poles that grocers